Okay real talk: Shavuot is the most slept-on holiday in the entire Jewish calendar and I will not be taking questions at this time.
No cap. Think about what this holiday actually is. The anniversary of the moment God gave the Jewish people the Torah at Mount Sinai. The Ten Commandments. The whole thing. The single most consequential document in the history of Western civilization, and also the moment that turned a bunch of former Egyptian slaves into an actual Jewish nation, dropped on this exact date, and somehow we give it less cultural real estate than Hanukkah. Hanukkah! A minor holiday that only blew up because it falls near Christmas! The disrespect is sending me.
Shavuot 2026 starts tonight at sundown and runs through Saturday night in the diaspora, going straight into Shabbat, so this year it is an unusually long stretch of Yom Tov. In Israel it is one day. Everywhere else, two. The main traditions are staying up all night studying Torah (called Tikkun Leil Shavuot, and yes it is exactly as intense as it sounds and yes people actually do it), going to synagogue in the morning to hear the Ten Commandments read out loud, and eating a completely unhinged amount of dairy food. We will get to the dairy food. The dairy food explanation goes extremely hard and I need you to stay with me.
But first, why this holiday hits different in 2026 specifically. We are living through a moment when being visibly Jewish in public has become, in certain cities and on certain campuses and in certain corners of the internet, a genuine act of courage. The ADL just dropped their annual audit showing 2025 had the highest number of violent antisemitic assaults ever recorded in America. Jewish students have spent two years navigating campuses where their identity gets treated like a political position requiring justification. People in London are getting stabbed at bus stops in Golders Green on a Tuesday morning. The vibe, to put it gently, has not been immaculate.
And into all of that walks Shavuot, which is essentially Judaism saying: we are still here, we are still the people of the Torah, and we are going to stay up all night studying it and then walk to the Kotel at sunrise with tens of thousands of other Jews and daven Shacharit together, because that is what we do, and what we have done every single year since 1967, and what we will keep doing. Staying up all night to study Torah in 2026 is genuinely based behavior. I said what I said.
The Torah has always had rizz, by the way. Three thousand years of being the most influential text in human history is not an accident. The drip is immaculate even if the people carrying it to shul at 5am after an all-night learning session absolutely do not have drip. Sleep-deprived, clutching a siddur, zero drip, still one of the most moving things you will ever witness. We love to see it.
Okay. The cheese. Buckle up buttercup.
When the Jewish people received the Torah at Mount Sinai, included in what they received were the laws of kashrut, which they had not previously been following. This meant that instantly, all their existing meat and all their cooking vessels were not kosher anymore. They became Jews, halachically speaking, in the exact moment the Torah was given, and Jewish law applied to them immediately and retroactively to everything they owned. Bestie, your whole kitchen just became treif. It’s giving divine plot twist. On top of that, the Torah was given on Shabbat, which meant they could not slaughter new animals even if they wanted to, and preparing a proper kosher meal from scratch involves sharpening a special knife, removing specific fats, salting and soaking the meat, and kashering all the vessels, which takes hours. So what did they eat? Cheese. Because cheese requires zero cooking, zero prep, and zero new utensils. They literally became a nation and immediately had nothing to eat except dairy. Which is the most Jewish possible outcome of receiving the Torah and I say that with full love.
There is also a tradition that while the Israelites were up at Sinai receiving the Torah, the milk back at camp had curdled on its own into cheese by the time they returned. God providing the snacks and understood the assignment completely. It’s giving divine catering. No notes.
This is why we eat cheesecake on Shavuot. And blintzes. Cheese kreplach. Quiche if you are feeling cosmopolitan. It is essentially a mitzvah to eat dairy tonight and tomorrow and I think that deserves significantly more recognition as a selling point for this holiday than it currently gets. Shavuot should be huge. The cheesecake alone should be huge.
Also we read the Book of Ruth on Shavuot and Ruth herself is extremely based and lowkey iconic and she deserves her flowers. She is a Moabite woman who, after her husband dies, chooses to follow her Jewish mother-in-law Naomi back to Israel and join the Jewish people entirely by choice, telling her “wherever you go I will go, wherever you lodge I will lodge, your people shall be my people and your God my God.” That is a slay. Ruth understood the assignment before the assignment was even given. The whole book is short, it is beautiful, and it is about chosen loyalty at a moment when walking away would have been the easier option, which feels extremely relevant to the current moment in Jewish history. Read it tonight. It will not take long. Ruth would have had immaculate rizz, just saying.
If you are in Jerusalem tonight, tens of thousands of people will be walking to the Kotel at dawn after studying Torah all night, which is one of the most genuinely moving things you can witness in this city and if you have never done it you need to add it to your list immediately. If you are in New York, the JCC Manhattan is running their annual all-night Tikkun from 9pm to 5am with the tagline “come for the revelation, stay for the cheesecake,” which is the best event marketing in the Jewish world right now, no notes. If you are literally anywhere, you can read Ruth, eat some cheese, and stay up a little later than usual thinking about what it means to be part of this people. That counts too.
Chag Shavuot Sameach. Go eat some cheesecake. You have full rabbinic permission and also my personal endorsement.
Hazak! Two things:
Wore a black&white BH hat, walking with our crew on the Eastside, coming up from R Yuda Cohen at Gramercy, to 48th St Kaballah Center for the post-studying dawn mikvah. Where all the mostly Spanish-speaking friendlies dressed in all white trying to live like us as Jews, all loved the BH hat!
And the alternative, less rules-based, more Sephardic-Moroccan-Tunisian-Habad take is that milk comes from Mother pure and ready to drink — so don’t think that Torah made all the food traif at Mt Sinai, but, like the Manna, the milk is all the baby needs, it’s ready to go.